Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (13 page)

On Wednesday, Steve finished the other Follies songs for the Young Four, making two sunshiny DeSylva, Henderson & Brown-style songs about the blissful future: “. . . You’re gonna love tomorrow, I’m giving you my personal guarantee” and “. . . No matter what goes wrong, Love will see us through till something better comes along.” There was relief from the actors. “Guess what?” Kurt Peterson said to his agent over the phone. “I have a number!” Michael took the songs and the four actors into the dance rehearsal room and began to stage them. He seemed somewhat relieved to be working with young actors who could learn fast and retain what they were shown. There was starting to be no time for contemplation, and Michael was starting to get annoyed at Steve. He wanted the rest of the songs finished.

There was tension when Steve came by on Thursday. He came into the stage managers’ office and cornered John Grigas and me. “Which one of you typed the lyric to ‘The World’s Full of Boys’?” I explained that it had been delivered to us from the Prince office uptown in the form that he was holding. “Well, whoever typed it corrected my lyrics as he went along. I carefully spelled ‘galop’
g-a-l-o-p,
and all the way through it was ‘corrected’ and spelled with two I’s.” He marched into a summit meeting with Hal and Michael. I took it upon myself to retype the whole lyric, including the proper spelling of “galop,” which, I didn’t realize, was an indication of a style of dance. A few moments later, Hal emerged from the meeting to take a phone call, saw me at the typewriter and asked, “Why are you doing that? I think the number is being cut.” He sent me to find out from Steve whether the song was in or out, which struck me as odd since he and Michael could surely have asked him directly. But something was up, and I was the fact-finder. Steve was in one of the rooms, talking with one of the actors, and as I waited, Hal and Michael asked, “What did he say?” I told them I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to ask him. “Hell!” one of them replied. When I finally did get to Steve, with a bit of a smirk he said that yes, the song had been cut.

 

 

P
eter Feller stopped in on Monday. He was the owner of the scenery studio bearing his family’s name. Feller’s was one of the two studios that built sets for Broadway shows, and they were building
Follies.
He had come by with some questions about the Follies drops and some of the rubble. His domain was a natural focus for tension between the desires of the designer, the needs of the director, and the producer’s budgetary concerns. But Feller was a diplomat, even though he looked like a character out of a 1940s movie—slick black hair parted in the middle, thin mustache, and black suit. He had four or five henchmen with him, similarly attired. When his questions got to budget, Hal had him speak first with Ruthie. Looking at some plans, Hal commented that “realism is slowly leaving our sets—doors went out last year, and table and chairs are gone now.”

Tharon Musser, the lighting designer, came around on Thursday for a meeting with Hal and Michael. She hadn’t turned up since the first day of rehearsal, nearly two weeks earlier, but she had been thinking and poring over the blueprints for the set. Obviously she was interested in knowing how the blocking was coming along so that she could figure out where she would need to hang the lighting instruments. Michael explained some ideas he was having about silhouettes and how they could be achieved. Tharon suggested backlighting. Michael described the Prologue and explained that he would need light coming from “all the diagonals,” and that he would need “a lot of light all over.” I gave her an up-to-date copy of the script with all the latest revisions, and she left.

Yvonne De Carlo was starting to master the dances for “Who’s That Woman?” She was also beginning to spend more time with Hal Hastings on her solo song “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Rumor had it that Steve was expanding the song for her, and everyone was waiting for the new material to arrive. The song, and the role of Carlotta, was intended as a cameo with a one-joke song tossed off. The character was a faded movie queen who had appeared in the Follies and whose one big number had been cut but has decided to come to the reunion to do her damn song once before the theater goes. She says the song is a college number about picking a guy for her first dance, but the lyric tells a slightly different story:

Turns out that despite his looking “reptilian” and “as for being saintly, even faintly, no,” what he can do well is “fox-trot,” with an emphasis on the first letter. One joke.

Yvonne had flown to New York to audition for the role of Phyllis. She was certainly in keeping with the kind of Hollywood personality being considered for the show, but she didn’t seem to have the right style for Phyllis. However, when she sang the song she had prepared for the audition (“Ten Cents a Dance”) someone said: “Carlotta.” She embodied Carlotta, but if she was to be cast, everyone knew that the role would have to be made more than a cameo. Hal wasn’t all that fond of “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” but he liked the marquee value of Yvonne’s name. He felt that she would need more than a one-joke number. Why not expand the song? Steve knew what it was and was reticent about adding to it, saying he would favor writing an entirely different number. But there were too many other concerns, and once she was cast, the decision was made to expand the song.

Alexis Smith was quietly working away. No one was aware of it, but she was working harder and pushing herself further than anyone else. To all appearances, she remained cool and relaxed. And the more she relaxed, the funnier she became. She chanced to walk by a dancer, one of whose roles was a waiter with whom she is caught necking late in the proceedings. He was crocheting. She looked slightly bemused, and asked what he was crocheting. “A pair of pants.” Her hairline rose slightly and her eyes slanted ever so slightly. “Oh.” As she walked down the hall she muttered under her breath, “That was not exactly the kind of young lover I had in mind.” Yvonne overheard her and chimed in with a complaint about the actor playing her escort. “I expected someone tall and dark. And I got a guy as tall as I am. He’s strong, but I’m just as strong. Here, feel my muscles.”

Fifi D’Orsay felt faint, tried to break a capsule of smelling salts, and was comforted by one of the stage managers, who sent her home for the rest of the day. When she appeared the next day, once again made-up and fluttery, she told anyone who would listen how marvelous her number was and how she needed to have more rehearsal to get it down pat. Michael began to stage it over the weekend, assisted by Graciela. Fifi was in her usual flustered state, muffed most of the lyrics, replacing them with “Ooh, la la!” Michael calmly stopped her, came over, put his arm around her. “Well, you know, I have my tricks, which I will put into the number when I am onstage, but I cannot show them to you now because I am not on the stage.” “Well,” Michael said, patiently, “you can tell me what you are going to do because I don’t want to be surprised every night.” “Don’t worry about it, chickie-poo, believe me, I am not a fool and I will give a real performance when I have my audience.” Michael took her by the hand, stood alongside her, and with Graciela close by, showed her some simple steps that he wanted her to try. She moved with him without looking to see what he was doing. He tried again, and then demonstrated a move that necessitated a turnaround. Fifi muttered that she didn’t want her back to the audience. That was enough. Patiently, Michael asked that everyone else clear out of the room so he and Graciela could work with her in private.

Ethel Shutta was getting more and more confident each day, although still fighting to learn her lines and lyrics. But she was having none of Fifi, who was trying to use her as a security blanket. She was actually older than Fifi, and was happy to be friendly, but, “Jesus, I can only take it to a point. And the only thing I don’t like about her is that goddamn hamminess.” She also pointed out that for all Fifi’s nervousness, she was like an eagle when any new line was given to someone else. “Shut up,” she told Fifi, “you ought to feel damned lucky to be working.” When Mary McCarty was on the
Tonight Show,
Fifi complained that
she
wasn’t asked. “There is no end to what I will do when it comes to publicity,” she told Mary Bryant, the show’s press agent.

Charles Welch and Dortha Duckworth were always sitting together, so much so that it seemed as if they
were
the Whitmans instead of
playing
the Whitmans. They were both short and slightly homey-looking. Their characters’ minds were going slightly, such that they didn’t really remember what in their past really happened and what was part of their old Follies act. Their number, “Rain on the Roof,” was, according to Dortha, “the most ingenuous example of love in the entire show.” When they were brought into staging rehearsals, the rehearsal pianist played the introduction and Hal Prince said, “God, that is so dreary. It should be a real introduction and come down the scale with pizzazz and not be so draggy.” Hal Hastings went over to the piano, played something frilly that fit the bill, and from then on that’s how the song began.

Since Michael had now worked with Fifi D’Orsay, Ethel Shutta, and Charles Welch and Dortha Duckworth, he could begin to assemble the Montage. The Whitmans would begin with “Rain on the Roof,” to be followed by “Broadway Baby” and then “Ah, Paris!” At the end, all three songs would be combined into a finale. Steve had composed all three songs with the idea of putting them together, but they didn’t quite fit. Hal Hastings was endeavoring to figure out how to adjust them so they would at least give the appearance of blending together. This was going to take up a lot of rehearsal time, and in Boston, once the audience’s response to Ethel’s “Broadway Baby” became apparent, the order would be changed so that her song would be last. And before the show even got to Boston, Dortha Duckworth would be fired.

“Who’s That Woman?” was rehearsed and rehearsed. It was hard for everyone. Ethel Barrymore Colt recounted the trials and tribulations involved in learning all the tap steps for the number and revealed that all the older women were afraid to admit when they got tired, but that every rehearsal winded them all. Privately, she said, they’d agreed that “tap” was a dirty word. They kept hoping and waiting for the young dancers to admit they were tired, too, and ask for a break, since Michael and Bob would be more likely to listen to them. And when Michael wanted to add a series of pirouettes to the number, she confessed that she just burst into tears. Sheila Smith said that the dance was indeed difficult and that she was amazed Michael had just plunged in with untrained dancers and given them such hard steps right off the bat.

On Thursday, Steve brought in a theme to use as the basis for the ballroom specialty dance, “Bolero d’Amour,” for Vincent and Vanessa. He had composed it in the taxicab on the way down to rehearsal, the only time, he said later, he would ever do that. He played it for Hal and Jim, both of whom approved. Then he gave it to John Berkman, the dance arranger, to play for Michael; it would be Berkman’s responsibility to fashion an arrangement to reflect the dance that Michael would create. A few moments later it was heard coming from the dance rehearsal room. There was some muttering that the theme sounded a little like the theme from
Auntie Mame.
“Bolero d’Amour” was to occupy a lot of time over the next several days. The other numbers had been mapped out, so Michael could turn rehearsals over to Bob and the assistants, but he would do “Bolero d’Amour” alone. It was in a different style from anything else in the show and was probably different from anything Michael had ever choreographed before. This was a big flowing ballroom dance, sexy in its undercurrents and gorgeous in its scope, with lots of long skirts, deep back bends, high kicks, and swirling around. Vincent and Vanessa would be shadowed by younger counterparts, played by Graciela Daniele and six-foot-tall Michael Misita. There were two other couples upstage. Michael had to work on his feet, and fast. Originally in four sections, it ended up in two. I think Michael wanted to show people he was capable of a sweeping romantic dance. He seemed fixated on it. It was the one number that Hal Prince, in retrospect, said he should have cut.

Saturday morning brought the first attempt at a run-through. The actors were, for the most part, off book with lines learned. Of course until this stage of rehearsal, most of the acting feels like word reciting and being in the right place at the right time; performances begin to emerge from this point onward, so whenever an actor showed a glimmer of a final performance, it was thrilling to everyone. The Prologue was included in this partial run-through, as were “Beautiful Girls” and “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” Then four book songs between Sally and Ben, which had been rehearsed sporadically, were included: “Don’t Look at Me,” the first time Sally runs into Ben, the man for whom she has been secretly pining all these years; his response, “The Road You Didn’t Take,” in which he thinks he’s justifying the decisions he has made in his life (“The Ben I’ll never be, Who remembers him?”); then Sally’s heartfelt lie about how wonderful her life is “In Buddy’s Eyes” (“I’m young, I’m beautiful . . . I’m still the princess, Still the prize”); and, finally, Ben’s admission to Sally of his mistake in marrying Phyllis: “Too Many Mornings” (“. . . Wishing that the room might be filled with you”). There were fumbles, but not from Dorothy, who got everything letter perfect. She and John McMartin were clearly working hard. Justine Johnston’s number, “One More Kiss,” the very first song ever written for
The Girls Upstairs,
was included for the first time. Left out was the Montage, “Who’s That Woman?” and all the songs that while being rehearsed were not yet ready to show, like the Young Four’s Follies numbers and “Can That Boy Fox Trot!”